The Young Curmudgeon

I'm off to Taiwan

Tonight I'm on a plane bound for Taiwan where I'll be for two weeks visiting my girlfriend's relatives. I'm bringing my crappy digital camera along. While I don't know of any massive anti-China protests being scheduled and I won't be able to come up with anything as cool as these instant classic panoramic photos of the massive protests last month, I will be photo-blogging from there. Be forewarned that when traveling in Asia my photographic taste tends more towards finding scenes of Blade Runner-esque urban chaos then temples and nature and all that stuff, but please keep checking in.

Instapundit Explains "Grindin'"

Today Glenn Reynolds tackles the subject of drug dealing:

I don't know Levitt's answer here, but one explanation (besides the obvious "they're idiots") for why people become drug dealers when the economic returns are poor is that being a drug dealer offers -- and, especially during the crack boom, offered -- nonmonetary returns, by having much more status than working minimum wage. (Read Richard Price's excellent book, Clockers for some very good illustrations of that phenomenon).

My historian-brother often says that one of the most interesting phenomena that he's observed is the cross-cultural willingness of people to trade away economic benefits for status. I suspect that this is one example of that. So, in a surprisingly similar way, is being a politician. That's an obviously poor economic move for most folks. But one of the drug dealers in Price's book talks about how he likes the way he becomes the center of attention when he enters a room full of junkies . . .

Surely he jests. As anyone with even a passing familiarity with the work of Jay-Z, 50 Cent, The Game et al knows, drug dealing is but a momentary way station on the path to an extremely lucrative career as a rapper. Right?

Still More on the Things You Don't Understand the Fuss About Meme

A Kiwi reader responds to the five things you don't understand the fuss about challenge. He boldly includes religion, politics, and sexual orientation. I'm right there with you man, especially after reading this comment thread and this one.

Geek News Update: Deadly Girl Gets a Manicure and Zombie Extra Tells All

My friend Ray and I both fall into some undefined category between "geeks" and regular guys. By that I mean that we have too much of an interest in genre films, science fiction, comics, superheros etc. to be thought of as normal folk, yet we're not obese or unhygienic enough to be thought of as hard-core geeks. With this in-between status comes an ability to "pass" in either geek or normal society.

So anyway Ray's always sending me these links to behind-the-scenes gossip from the set of the Fantastic Four movie or whatever. In fact, he sends me this kind of stuff so often I've started calling them "Ray's Geek News Updates" like they're some ongoing feature on a website. I've been thinking that I should take the best bits and blog about them, because I think the idea of there being a separate subcategory of "geek news" is a good meme to get going. Also, because I'd like to do something with all the various links to Harry Knowles and company clogging my inbox. So, this - I hope - will be the first installment in an ongoing feature - the Geek News Update.

Deadly Girl Gets a Manicure

This first comes from me, not Ray. My girlfriend works part-time at an ultra-fancy spa in Downtown Manhattan. Who should happen to show up there for a pedicure a couple of times over the last few weeks but Judy Greer! Because we live in a fallen world I provided a link to her IMDB page, but really she is so beautiful and talented that she should be a household name. Mainstream movie fans may remember her from her roles in 13 Going on 30, The Village, and The Wedding Planner. Those of geekier, more warped sensibilities should remember her above all for two things: her unforgettable work as "Deadly Girl" in The Specials and her co-starring role opposite the great Goldberg in The Hebrew Hammer. (Yes, I realize that The Hebrew Hammer was in almost every way a disappointment, even to us hardcore Goldbergophiles, and by that I mean people like me who've seen Scotch and Milk more than five times. I also realize that Judy Greer was too shiksa-looking for the lead role. But dammit the concept was funny. It wasn't her fault that the script was bad.)

The Specials is a super-obscure film with a cult-following. It had a tiny theatrical run in LA and New York but was in essence direct to video. It did the superheros-as-regular-people thing way before The Incredibles and in my opinion better, though not in a remotely family-friendly fashion. Judy Greer played a hilarious character called "Deadly Girl" whose power was mostly acting like a really bitchy goth chick. Pure genius. The film also features a great comic lead performance by Thomas Haden Church back when people still only thought of him as "that Lloyd dude from Wings." Well worth adding to the old Netflix queue.

So anyway Judy Greer came in on two occasions and got a manicure. My girlfriend says she's "nice". How's that for hard-hitting celebrity gossip? This Judy Greer sighting happens right as she seems to be getting a lot of good press, both in the mainstream and geek worlds.

Zombie Extra Tells All

That was Ray's subject line when he e-mailed me this most excellent USA Today piece. The reporter - a fan of George Romero's work since the original Night of the Living Dead - gets to live out her dream of being a zombie extra in a Romero film, the forthcoming Land of the Dead. It turns out that more than a few of the zombies are hardcore Romero geeks, doing it out of love.

So We Got a New Pope

All I have to say is that I loved his previous work as Cliff on Cheers and I wish him the best of luck in his new endeavor.

Tomorrow's Headlines Today

I, like, totally called this meme. Just look:

I'm very surprised he [Julian Sanchez -ed.] doesn't like the brilliant Deadwood though. He must really not take his work home with him, because for someone of his left/libertarian politics I would think the show would be a wet dream. The perfect anarcho-capitalist situation is set up. Outside corporate and government interests come in to try to ruin it. Organic, local institutions like small business (whatever those businesses might be) rise up to fight those outside influences. I'm surprised libertarians haven't embraced this show more.
-Me, April 14, 2005.

If conservatives get to claim South Park, I hope their ideological counterparts will consider for self-branding purposes the astonishing HBO series Deadwood, which I finally saw for the first time last night. Sure, it's a little rough around the edges, but that's the point! Out with the mealy-mouthed PC murmuring, in with the ribald & flowery language of the American frontier. Gun ownership is a given, spontaneous order is a daily, peach-gobbling experiment; and the federal government is a meddlesome, land-stealing enemy.
-Matt Welch, April 18, 2005.

Welch's entire post is well worth reading though, as it includes links to some promising data that shows that the Democrats may be re-inventing themselves as the party of "don't tread on me"-ism out west.

I saw the South Park Conservatives book in the store yesterday. It's notable primarily for how physically thin it is. The hardcover is about as thick as the pages inside are. Yet, it's still technically a hardcover book so it costs something like twenty-five dollars. It boasts extensive blurbs from Jonah Goldberg and from various conservative bloggers who from the jacket copy I see are profiled glowingly within the thin volume itself.

 

More From the Spirit of America Lebanon Blog

Today Michael J. Totten has another inspiring and urgent message from the front lines of the struggle for Lebanese independence, "The Countdown":

The Cedar Revolutionaries briefly lost their focus after the million-person demonstration in Martyr's Square. They weren't sure what to do next, exactly, aside from setting up a tent-city next to Rafik Hariri's grave site. Some dissidents felt like they had already won - when they clearly had not. Others were worried they would never be able to bring yet another million people down to the square for demonstrations.

The Syrian puppet regime in Beirut has been playing for time, changing the subject, and coming up with all manner of public distractions - the Pope's funeral was only the latest. People here are sick nearly to death of it, especially those who are playing a waiting game in the tent-city. So yesterday, in response to all this, they unfurled a new public campaign. It is simple, unambiguous, and pressing.

They are demanding elections on May 29. And they are demanding the government call for those elections by passing the necessary election law 30 days in advance . . .

Read the rest at the new Spirit of America-affiliated blog here. Donate to the cause of the Cedar Revolution here. As Michael wrote in the e-mail publicizing this post, "Please help them out. These people are facing down Hezbollah and Syria - and they're playing for keeps."

 

More on the Things You Don't Understand the Fuss About Meme

U of C undergrad blogger Phoebe Malz has answers up to this as well. As for her take on Cobb Coffee Shop, it's been so long since I was a U of C undergrad I can't remember, but my guess is that the people who work there are mean and surly because they are Chicagoans and people from Chicago are generally mean and surly, probably because they're forced to live in Chicago. People from New York on the other hand are generally kind, sunny, and helpful, even if they are more to-the-point and speak more quickly. Seriously, it completely makes a hash of Midwest versus East Coast stereotypes.

As for Bubble Tea I can't help her, but she needs to be more specific. Are we talking Saint Alp's or Ten Ren's Teahouse here? Or has she actually gone to Flushing and tried Quickly's. If you don't like it by that point you're never going to like it.

Expensive jeans generally come in better colors, have better looking denim, and fit your ass better in my opinion.

She also says she'd like to see "other people's lists as well". Since, I'm most definitely "other people", I consider myself officially invited and you should too. I'll have something further up shortly, or not. This is internet self-publishing you know.

Hi There

After my recent full-throated participation in the culture wars, I've been more interested in - say - enjoying the fine spring weather than in engaging in yet another on-line debate as to whether Christopher Hitchens is a genius or an overrated hack. However, my absence from the blogging "scene", if you will, has caused a reader (one more reader than I realized I still had) to lament my lapse into blogospheric non-existence, so I feel it behooves me to post something or other.

First, if I were blogging, and I'm not sure that I am, I would certainly be extensively linking Michael J. Totten's Lebanon blog. This is the real thing, like some sort of fever dream of liberal hawk bloggers come gloriously to life. Here we have American friends of freedom in the Middle East going to the heart of an organic, indigenous pro-democracy movement in a Middle Eastern country, collecting donations to aid said movement, and blogging everything they see. Best of all perhaps, it's a non-violent, non-military way of helping to reform the Arab world so everyone should feel like they can participate. If you want to make a donation to the protesters in the tent cities of Beirut who hope to get Syria and Hezbollah out of Lebanon non-violently, you can use the form at the top of the every page of the blog. I have, and I'm desperately poor. This would seem to be a much more promising use of blogging than merely shouting about the same stuff they're shouting about on cable news.

In other news, how about America's Next Top Model last night!? Girrrrrrlllllllll!!!! Seriously  though. The unprecedented two-girl elimination! Then, Tyra's dressing down of Miami-ghetto-girl-almost-made-good Tiffany! That was one of the most compelling moments I've ever seen on television. So compelling in fact, that - apologies to Conan O'Brien - I've taken to calling it simply "compellevision". It actually reminded you of why the reality-TV idea seemed good to begin with. There was genuine emotion up there. Honest, real stuff far beyond the crap that most hack TV-writers can come up with. Does stuff like that ever happen on American Idol or The Apprentice or any of those shows I ask you? I think not. That's why Tyra Banks is the thinking, um, man's reality TV queen I say!

Upon surveying what the kids call the "blogosphere" I see that Ross Douthat and some other young smarty-smarts are playing this game where you "list five things that people in your circle of friends or peer group are wild about, but you can’t really understand the fuss over." Nobody asked me to play, but since I hate a lot of stuff I thought I'd at least talk about the game and other people's choices.

I give Douthat mad props for mentioning the immensely overrated Ferris Bueller's Day Off. He's right that part of what makes this film - which as a Gen-Xer I'm legally obligated to love - so irksome, is how smug the tone is. But, for me, what's annoying about this movie, and a whole lot of other putatively comedic pop culture, is something even more basic than smugness. It's the fact that the main character is a winner. Winning simply isn't funny! Or sympathetic! Comedy is a reaction to losing, to embarrassment, to pain, to life's unfairness etc. Though this film is putatively a "comedy", what exactly is so damn funny about seeing the smooth, cocky self-assured hero triumph without effort over every adversity! Meanwhile, the far more sympathetic, far more flawed Cameron ends the film having to deal with whatever psychological torture his father has in mind for him because of the car, a car he wouldn't have even wrecked had he not initially followed Ferris's idea of stealing it. The golden boy goes home unpunished, while the imperfect - and funnier looking - characters such as Jeanie and Cameron are crushed. Har dee har har! What is this? A teen comedy or a Nazi propaganda film? Ferris in reality has a lot more in common with the 35-year-old blond-haired corvette-driving villians of most 80s teens comedies than he does with any kind of sympathetic hero.

Though generally I'm also not even wild about (and this is true heresy for someone of my age group here) the entire John Hughes/80s Teen Comedy genre. Part of this is because I saw a lot of the canonical films at the wrong age (i.e. too late). The ne plus ultra of the genre was supposed to be The Breakfast Club, which I saw at roughly the right age. What supposedly made this film so brilliant, for both teens and adults alike, was how it exploded teen stereotypes. I've seen it both as an adult and a teenager, and both times it seemed to do nothing but build them up; smart kids are miserable dorks, jocks are stupid etc. In fact, contrary to virtually other member of Generation-X I've met, I actually think that those who've grown up post Gen-X have generally had a better, smarter, less-condescending choice of teen-oriented films, from Can't Hardly Wait to Ghost World to, yes, even the first American Pie.

I now see that Jonah Goldberg says that this game, pretentiously called by the people who started it the "Caesar's Bath game", is a "lefty blog meme."  Since I'm told every day by conservatives that I'm not a conservative and by liberals that I'm not a liberal, I suppose I could just invite myself in to play, but it's more fun just to comment on other people's choices anyway.

Matthew Yglesias's saying that The Atlantic Monthly is "a bad magazine" strikes me as a particularly cracked out utterance. I could see saying that it was "overrated" or "not as good as it was under Michael Kelly", but "bad"? Let's get some perspective here. It seems to me that there's not real substance to his critique of the publication; just a lot of "Oh, look at me I'm the Atlantic I'm so fancy and important, but to bad really I'm not!" He holds their publication of Howell Raines's lunatic screed against them, but really I think that they performed a public service by letting everyone see how crazy Raines was and how bad things had gotten at the Times (which maybe is why Yglesias didn't like their publishing it.)

I could never respect anyone who doesn't understand why college basketball is better than the NBA. His description of college basketball players as "puny" and "second-rate" betrays the fact that he's probably never watched a game. But even if they were, what he doesn't understand for some reason is that college players play harder and more passionately and better as a team. Would you rather see LeBron James playing one more meaningless game out of 82, just thinking about his paycheck, or two teams of only slightly worse athletes playing their heart out for the glory of their respective schools? If you even had to think before answering that question you're not a basketball fan.

I found Julian Sanchez's responses surprisingly sympatico. I'm very surprised he doesn't like the brilliant Deadwood though. He must really not take his work home with him, because for someone of his left/libertarian politics I would think the show would be a wet dream. The perfect anarcho-capitalist situation is set up. Outside corporate and government interests come in to try to ruin it. Organic, local institutions like small business (whatever those businesses might be) rise up to fight those outside influences. I'm surprised libertarians haven't embraced this show more.

I'm totally with him on including Ernest Hemingway though. I've never understood why Hemingway's ghastly, mannered writing style was considered fit for the canon and I've long suspected it was a colossal prank by English Professors as Sanchez does.

It'll be interesting to see when/if this meme gets back to me through the proper channels now.

 

 

Well, That Didn't Take Long

I was wondering how quickly after the Pope John Paul II's death Christopher Hitchens would come out with his requisite Pope-bashing column, and here it is already, maybe a new record for one of Hitch's patented "kick 'em when they're dead" pieces. Despite what some of my readers would probably assume, I'm not normally a huge fan of these Hitch pieces (Though I loved the one about how Bob Hope never actually said anything that was funny), however I think in this case someone had to say something like this in the face of the non-stop hagiography coming from virtually every other corner. Also, it's good to have the more critical point-of-view represented by something more intelligent than the idiotic and juvenile Matt Taibbi/New York Press stunt from a couple weeks ago.

The Hitchens piece is less harsh than this genre of Hitch piece normally is. It's more of an attack on the Catholic Church generally (and a fairly substantive one) than on the deceased Pope himself. As for Pope John Paul II himself, I myself have no strong feelings about him one way or another, which is why I find it strange that so many non-Catholics have such strong positive feelings about him, for instance Ann Althouse, who says that, "Hearing the news stories about him today and yesterday, I wondered if it was not the case that he was the greatest human being to have lived during my own lifetime." Huh? He was a human being with faults and with admirable qualities like all of us, just played out on a grander scale because of the power of his office. It was admirable that he stood up to communism. It was not, in my opinion, admirable that he looked the other way while his priests sexually abused children. It was also not admirable that he Tariq Aziz a personal audience at the Vatican right before the Iraq war, and that he fought against the use of any sort of birth control or contraception in the Third World, and even against the use of condoms to prevent the spread of STDs and AIDS in Africa. 

While he inspired social conservatives, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, with his steadfast support for "moral values" and for the "culture of life", many of his acolytes seemed to completely ignore his unyielding opposition to the death penalty (something which I personally see as another fault because I'm extremely pro death-penalty) and, again, his opposition to the Iraq War. In short, there are contradictions and complexities here, a person who was something other than the perfect mixture of Jesus Christ and Rambo that Fox News and the blogosphere are trying to portray. Really, I think that's all this Hitchens piece is trying to say and I'm glad he wrote it. Predictably, it's already resulted in this sort of puffed-up outrage in the blogosphere.